Upbeat Romance in ‘Balcony Scene’

For centuries playwrights have positioned women on balconies while beseeching lovers rhapsodized in the garden below. And now, in a sunny salute to romance at the top of the stairs, comes the contemporary comedy, “The Balcony Scene,” at the Company of Angels.

A three-character love story, the play is lean and strongly acted by Scott N. Stevens and Suanne Spoke as adjacent apartment dwellers who meet, skirmish and fall in love on their balconies.

He is a historian and hermit, cowering from life’s dangers; she is getting over an abusive boyfriend, trying to regain her self-esteem. The characters are appealingly guarded and charmingly complete each other’s sentences, which gives them a quirky rapport.

Midway through the couple’s first nervous, candlelit dinner, sparks fly when the woman’s macho, rejected ex-lover barges in (a visceral performance by stand-in Greg Albanese). Will the reclusive dinner guest from next door come out of his shell and show some mettle? In a flash, the play turns surprisingly tough.

Chicago playwright Wil Calhoun propels this slight confection with a tight narrative structure and credible dialogue, and director Mary Lou Belli draws superb work from the reticent Stevens and the garrulous Spoke.

Set designer William Maynard’s dual stucco balconies with railings may not be romantic enough for Cyrano or Romeo, but they do just fine as urbanscape.

“Balcony Scene,” Angels Theatre, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Fridays - Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 23. $12; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour , 50 minutes.

Dialing for Love in ‘Sweet Talk’

A balcony scene can also play over the phone. “Sweet Talk,” another three-character romance at Actors Alley, is the ultimate techno-erotic flip side of an old-fashioned clinch under the stars.

On stage, an invisible wall separates a young man’s murky apartment from the cluttered office of a telephone fantasy sex service. A brassy blonde (the vivid but briefly seen Sharri Hefner) is painting her nails and feigning orgasm for a credit-card client at the end of the line. But this is not a 976-PLAY.

Phone sex between playwright Peter Lefcourt’s two central characters (Susan Mackin and Brien Fornesi) is about the power of imagination to transport lonely and alienated high-rise denizens to a world of romantic rapture that is emotionally orgasmic on a level of Cyrano and Roxane or “Casablanca’s” Bogart and Bergman.

In a clever twist, it’s Fornesi’s male customer who knocks the professional phone playmate off her robotic sexual toes. He becomes the fantasy-giver, guiding the increasingly seduced Mackin into glamorous realms of sensual danger in throbbing scenarios that re-invent the characters in 1912 Budapest and 1939 Vienna. Over the phone, he turns the woman into a ravenous time-traveler/lover/junkie.

Lefcourt’s play, which echoes “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” reminds you of a time when language was the food of love. But he hasn’t found a way to satisfactorily resolve his ending, which, like the set, is on the dreary side.

Michael Lilly directed.

“Sweet Talk,” Actors Alley, 12135 Riverside Drive, North Hollywood, Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. (matinees Feb. 3 , 17 at 2 . ) Ends Feb. 23. $12-$15; (818) 986-2278. Running time: 2 hours.

Dick’s Sci-Fi Story Poorly Served on Stage

Fans of another writer with a strong following, science-fiction novelist Philip D. Dick, will certainly be curious about the stage adaptation of Dick’s last book in his famous Valis series, “Radio Free Albemuth,” at Theatre of N.O.T.E.

Dick, who died in 1982 and who wrote the novel on which the movie “Blade Runner” was based, is not served well by Lisa Morton’s wooden direction nor her literal adaptation of this government-conspiracy yarn, based on Dick’s own ordeal with the FBI and his experiences with extraterrestrial visions. Heady stuff in a novel.

But this production is so devoid of style, strewn with plot, and heavy with exposition that there’s no time for characterization.

The two principal actors are likeable (Paul Clemens and David LaPorte) and play aspects of Dick himself, who even calls one of his characters by his own name. But this show is closer to an audio cassette than a play. Morton, it seems, is too close to the book to envision it as theater. The result is amateurish.

“Radio Free Albemuth,” Theatre of N.O.T.E., 1705 N. Kenmore Ave., Tuesdays - Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 27. $10; (213) 666-5550. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Wilde’s ‘Salome’ Reminds of DeMille

In a dim rock ‘n’ roll bar called the King King Club, Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” unfolds like a bizarre Aubrey Beardsley dream, a theatrical oddity that looks like a frieze on an urn staggering to life.

After his imprisonment, Wilde wrote this one-act play in French. Britain banned it and Sarah Bernhardt produced it in Paris in 1896. Steven Berkoff last year scored a large success in London’s West End with a highly stylized, slow-motion version. At King King, it only seems florid, stilted and declamatory.

Lisa Nemacheck’s sexually voracious Judean temptress Salome, Wyn Costello’s scandalized Queen Herodias, Gregg Alden Koski’s dirty old Herod, and most of the Syrians, Nazarenes and other biblicals on view earn battle ribbons.

Director Richard Stone and his 14 cast members have flung this musty curiosity to the mat, staged it in a straightforward, uncampy manner, with crystal-clear diction, and layered it with all the period trappings--including a Dance of the Seven Veils and a grotesquely realistic, decapitated head of John the Baptist on a platter.

The experience is like a visit to an old Cecil B. DeMille epic.

Also on the bill is Joyce Carol Oates’ dark, tenement-room one-act, “Ontological Proof of My Existence,” competently directed by Anthony DiNiro. Steve Zerna is impressive as a devilishly nasty man who keeps a young woman as a love slave in a dank room. Bree Benton, in a grueling role, is his victim. Questions of being and reality lurk between the lines.

“Salome” and “Ontological Proof of My Existence,” King King Club, 467 S. La Brea Ave., S aturdays - Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 17. $10; (213) 871-8580. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.